"Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art". (Exhibition notes).

at the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. September 21, 2002-February 16, 2003

Whatever you do this month, get yourself to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There you will find a perfect exhibition from a heretofore anonymous art collector named Lois Orswell (1904-1998). In life unknown to nearly everyone in the art world, Orswell assembled one of the most sensitive private collections of modern art. At her house in rural Connecticut, she carried on an intense friendship of correspondence and mutual support with David Smith, and quietly donated her collection to Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, without fanfare, into the hands of curators like Marjorie B. Cohn, who now presides over the current exhibition of her bequest.

In mounting a show of this kind--an exhibition of a collection--a curator must confront not only the provenance of the art but to varying degrees the provenance of the collector. More often than not, the collector fades to the background, mentioned in the exhibition titles but little elsewhere. The splendid "Thaw Collection: Master Drawings and Oil Sketches, Acquisitions Since 1994," on view at the Morgan Library in New York last fall, is one case in point: here the intelligence of the collection spoke silently of the intelligence of the collector.

In "Lois Orswell, David Smith, and Modern Art," however, Marjorie Cohn has placed Orswell center stage. Her collection extends from Arshile Gorky, Auguste Rodin, Max Beckmann (his Actors [1941-1942] is remarkable), Jacques Lipchitz, Eduardo Paolozzi, and others in her early years of aquisition to important items of African, Asiatic, and ancient art later on, to one of the more important collections of Gaston Lachaise in the United States, to the most personal collection of David Smith anywhere (Terpsichore and Euterpe [1947]; Fish [1950-1951]; Detroit Queen [1957]; Doorway on Wheels [1960]; numerous paintings, photographs, and studies). Assembled from the 1940s to the 1960s, her inventory grew to over 340 items, all donated to the Fogg, with 140 works now on display.

Yet it is the provenance of Orswell herself that equally attracts. Marjorie Cohn, who developed a friendship with Orswell late in Orswell's life, has infused the show with the personality of this spirited, tenacious individual. (The show's working title was, I note, "Passionate and Obstinate.")